The internet has always been a scary place. Maybe two decades ago, your digital profile might have been minimal. Email and text, maybe a blog. Now, most of us live an incredible proportion of our lives in the digital world. Myself included. We are digital citizens. And we face great danger.
I'd like to break us digital citizens down into three rough groups:
1) Digital Wolves- Phishers, hackers, spammers and regular crooks that have evolved from petty theft to petty cyber theft. How many people do you know that have had their email, bank accounts or social media hacked? How many do you know that have had their identities compromised more than once in a year? Add government funded agencies and the huge online community of the Dark Web. Add massive tech companies that track you like an animal.
The wolves are all around us.
2) Digital Sheep- We are all digital sheep in some ways. We tend to trust things. We feel comforted by that little green lock next to the letters HTTPS. We trust the coffee shop wifi a bit too much. We trust our digital devices a bit too much. Look up KRACK attack (then go check your wifi router settings ASAP).
Some Digital Sheep take everything for granted, neither having the time nor patience to deal with all this internet hookey. VPNs and 2FA are just so much gibberish! Yet, the Digital World is cruel and there are many wolves.
Some of us are wary sheep, educating ourselves on known exploits and doing simple things to fix holes in our digital armor. We don't bank on public wifi. We log out, opt out and install anti-tracking plug ins to our browsers. We are wary, but not enough.
To the extreme, you have Digital Mountain Goats, who go so far to protect themselves, they are damn near unreachable. Good for them, but it must be a lonely life...
Digital Sheriffs- (I can't stick with the animal analogy for too long) I'm talking about the old Sheriffs of England and the Old West- wading into the fight, guns and fists flying, doing everything possible to stop the plunder. These are cyber security professionals, the bossy, overworked IT folks at work. They won't write you a ticket, but they will give you a lecture on how to be smart and avoid danger. They man roadblocks (firewalls in this case) to warn of unsafe avenues. They make you reset ridiculously long passwords every so often, and chortle when you forget, and they have to reset it after you've locked yourself out.
If you say the wrong thing in causal conversation, they might grab your phone and start modifying the settings to ensure you aren't tracked, spammed or hacked. You promise to fix the problem, "right as soon as I get home, officer" but you forget. And they remind you with a lecture only Bill Gates would enjoy.
Digital Sheriffs are as essential in this modern age as the law enforcement types. It's a stressful, thankless job that is constantly beset by failure. The bad guys, the Wolves, will always get through and pick off an unsuspecting Sheep. There just aren't enough Sheriffs.
The best thing, a Sheriff would say, is to be a wary Sheep. Educate yourself against the threats. Accept the inconvenience of long passwords like you accept the inconvenience of long traffic lights.
My advice? Be a Sheriff!
<iframe src="https://giphy.com/embed/WtRD06y3zyA4U" width="480" height="320" frameBorder="0" class="giphy-embed" allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/john-WtRD06y3zyA4U">via GIPHY</a></p>
Er, maybe not THAT Sheriff from GIPHY.
Don't outsource your digital (or physical security). Become educated, involved and wary. Stick up for the Sheep you see wandering the digital (and physical) world unaware.
This Christmas, I've decided to give my parents a "Digital Makeover". (Whether they like it or not) I'm installing a VPN, installing patches in their wifi router, changing the settings on their phones, and generally lecturing them about the dumb things they do in their digital lives. They get hacked constantly and I'm sick of it.